


Concerning the 88th Bearer of the Sacred Name of the Tombkeeper Line

by pipistrelle



Series: Necromantic Grad School AU [4]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, F/F, Fluff, head empty no plot, stupid fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:54:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27394558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: Harrowhark looked at the gleamingly polished blade of the bread knife, then back up at her cavalier, who was grinning so hard her teeth must hurt."Stabbyhark?"
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Series: Necromantic Grad School AU [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1956787
Comments: 20
Kudos: 214





	Concerning the 88th Bearer of the Sacred Name of the Tombkeeper Line

**Author's Note:**

> This is very pointless and unedited but here it is anyway, no rules no regrets. 
> 
> Thanks to the Discord server for coming up with the idea and kicking it around with me, y’all are amazing always.

Harrow usually spent the climb up to their ninth-floor apartment designing skeletal elevator-repair mechanisms in her head. The actual structure needed for a replacement elevator was easy, a basic cage of ribs would do; the trouble was in the pulley, which would require at least one kind of tendon. Harrow did not enjoy working with tendon. She was not used to accounting for stretch. The brute-force solution would involve simply having a skeleton carry her up the stairs, or a tower of skeletons lift her up the useless elevator shaft, but either option always seemed like a massive waste of energy, thanergetically speaking. (And Gideon would laugh at her. A tertiary concern at best, but she couldn't seem to squash it effectively.)

More than slightly out of breath, deep in thoughts of vertical lift and the pressure tolerance of compressed calcium, she unlocked the apartment door and froze at a ringing cry of "On guard!"

Automatically one hand snapped to the doorframe to trigger her extensive and thoroughly mean-spirited wards -- but they were totally dormant, no hint of reaction to any stranger necromantic or mundane, and they hadn't been tampered with. The cool gray light of a clouded afternoon painted the whole room in flat gradations of colorlessness. No murderous lurker launched themselves at her. No ominous figure loomed menacingly. Everything seemed in its proper place. 

Only -- there. Something moved, glinting, out of the deeper shadow under the couch. Something… spinning?

Harrow had automatically released the bone clasp on her bracelet of molars, dropping them into her palm, ready to be flung and scattered into a skeletal vanguard to meet an attack. She refastened the bracelet with a sigh. "Griddle, what is this?"

Gideon rose from behind the sofa where she'd been crouched just out of Harrow's line of sight. She was filthy and grinning. "This? This is the most ferocious, bloodthirstiest gladiator on the planet! Vanquisher of Ankles! Destructor of Dust! Feared by all who look upon her! Scourge of stains and tyrant of tidying --"

As this seemed likely to go on for some time, Harrow stepped delicately sideways to avoid being skewered and bent to pick up the Vanquisher of Ankles. It was round and plastic, surprisingly heavy, with whirring brushes on the bottom and the biggest serrated bread knife they owned duct-taped to the top. It beeped in sad distress as it lost contact with the floor.

"-- Stabbyhark the Roomba!" Gideon crowed.

Harrowhark looked at the gleamingly polished blade of the bread knife, then back up at her cavalier, who was grinning so hard her teeth must hurt. " _Stabbyhark_?"

"Stabbyhark Nonavacuumus! I named her after you, duh, because she's tiny and stupidly sharp and loves pain! And she's undefeatable! Cam and I held a tournament and she _wrecked_ three mops and Babs's stupid-ass knife _and_ got him in the leg. She's a fighter." Gideon sidled closer and rested her hands over Harrow's, turning the thing to show her a blackened mark on one side that very easily could have come from the heel of Tern's impeccably polished boot.

"Is this the finest cavalier training in the world, holding -- gladiatorial bouts with cleaning supplies?" Harrow demanded. "Is that what you do all day when you're not in lecture?"

"Basically. It's boss and you should try it." Gideon was, as usual, completely unapologetic. Harrow did feel a faint buzz of warmth behind her sternum at the thought of Ianthe’s cavalier falling victim to a wayward bread knife while Harrow’s own cavalier watched and laughed; but she made sure to arch an eyebrow coldly to hide it.

As much as she might approve of Griddle’s choice of targets, she did have standards to maintain. "It's ridiculous. It's not even enchanted."

"You could add bones to it if you want! I was thinking like maybe some big-ass spikes. Or extra bone knives." Gideon leaned in conspiratorially, childishly eager. "She's to help guard the place. You know, because you're a paranoid psycho-witch who thinks pigeons are trying to break in and assassinate us."

Harrow scowled and tipped Stabbyhark Nonavaccuumus over to examine its underside, which was mostly cremains and flakes of dried blood. It was astounding how well the stuff blended into their awful carpet. "I changed the sensitivity on the windowsill wards, they haven't reacted to a bird in months. And this is a totally useless piece of garbage. Get rid of it."

Gideon rescued her beloved garbage robot from Harrow's disdainful grip. "Counteroffer: we're keeping her because it's funny as fuck," she said brightly. "I will give you a hundred dollars if you make a bone lance and joust with her right now."

"You don't have a hundred dollars."

"That's not a no."

"No," Harrow said firmly. "Take your toy elsewhere, Griddle, I have work to do." 

"What if I bribe you with my smokin' hot body," Gideon tried, but Harrow was already shouldering her way past her cavalier and into the kitchen. She tucked herself between the kitchen table and the wall, and hastily began constructing a fortification of books to hide the flush she could feel creeping up her neck into her face. 

“I can’t imagine what you mean by that,” she said aloud, as sternly as she could. Although the problem was actually that, despite her most rigorous and disciplined efforts, she could not stop herself from imagining it. 

Gideon, accursedly persistent and unfairly muscular, had followed her. Stabbyhark was nowhere in sight; Harrow could hear it whirring softly to itself as it feasted on the bone-saturated shag under the couch. Gideon rested her hands on the back of Harrow’s chair and her chin on the top of Harrow's head, peering down at _The Mysteries of Marrow Vol IX_ in her hands as though it were fascinating. "Come ooooooon, can we keep her? Please? I promise I'll take her for walks and everything."

"I don't have time to argue with you about your useless junk," Harrow said snippily, as she absolutely did not melt into her idiot cavalier's embrace. "Just keep it out of my way."

——

"Dearly beloved," Gideon intoned, "we are gathered here today to mourn the short, kickass life of Stabbyhark Nonavacuumus, Obliterator of Assholes, Pint-sized Powerhouse, Mega-Mop of Mystery --"

"Will you get on with it," Harrow snapped.

"-- who was tragically murdered by her namesake, when all she had done was faithfully serve --"

"It _stabbed_ me!"

"-- until the day she mistook her mistress's bony foot for a dead fish -- which, really, who can blame her, the resemblance is uncanny -- and when she valiantly attempted to clean it --"

"This is idiotic," Harrow cried, at last moved to a passion that could not be satisfied by mere commentary. She broke the line of mourners, which consisted of herself, Camilla and Palamedes (both looking appropriately somber), and stalked towards Gideon, who had thrown one of Harrow's old tattered black vestments around her torso like a skimpy and historically inaccurate toga at a particularly goth toga party. She had even daubed on a sketchy try at sacramental paint. Looking at it made Harrow queasy, probably because Gideon hadn't had to apply it for years and had never been good at it to begin with. She looked like a clay skull had been run over by a tank and smeared across half a mile of asphalt.

At Gideon's feet the deceased rested in a cardboard box on the withered grass. The late Stabbyhark was still recognizably circular in shape, though the three-foot bone spike driven through its center had broken the continuity of its plastic shell and exposed much of its wiring. The bread knife had been removed from its cradle of tape and laid reverently across the corpse, as befitted a warrior being buried with honors.

Gideon could muster up a creditable Drearburh boom even here, on the hillside behind the Library, in the sunlight and the open air. "At least she died as she lived: by stabbing. Would anyone like to say any last words?"

"She will be missed," said Palamedes, who was somehow managing to keep a straight face. Camilla bowed her head in salute.

Harrowhark knelt beside the box. She removed the studded phalange from her left ear and crumbled it into ash, which she smeared across the broken carapace with the pad of her thumb. "May her spirit journey lightly into oblivion. May her carcass be of use to her ancestors and generations unborn. May her memory rest insensate and undisturbed in the silence of the tomb. I ask this as one who has bent the dead to her will, and call her now to go as I have bid."

Camilla and Palamedes didn't react -- of course not, why would they react to one more bit of dark mystic nonsense from Harrowhark Nonagesimus? -- but Gideon sucked in a breath through her teeth, recognizing the cadence of the last rites of Drearburh. 

Palamedes, appointed pallbearer, approached and lifted the box so he could bear it away to the trunk of Cam's car and thence to some electronics-recycling place he got spare computer parts from. Only when it was gone did Harrow stand and lift her head.

Gideon tugged her close with an arm around her waist, just a shade too tight to be casual. She couldn't quite keep her voice casual, either; a faint discordant note of worry soured the humor in it. "Yikes. Harrow, it was just a roomba, you didn't have to go full nun."

Harrow permitted herself to be held. The scratchy weave of her old ceremonial shawl (how had Gideon gotten her hands on that?) rubbed against her cheek, calling up a host of confusing revenant sensations. For a moment the gloom and gravity of the deep and haunted places of her youth pooled beneath the autumn sunshine all around her, like a layer of contaminated water under an oil slick. Then she snapped herself out of it. Gideon was watching her with apprehension approaching alarm. “Seriously, I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to —“

Harrow shook her head impatiently. Pained, she said, "I didn't mean to kill it. It startled me."

Relieved, Gideon kissed the top of her head and huffed a laugh into her hair. "I know. It's okay. I was just giving you shit with all that murder stuff."

"It's --" She wanted to say _It's not okay_ , but she couldn't quite articulate why. "It was -- you gave it to me. The gifts of a cavalier to her necromancer should not be -- carelessly discarded. Or destroyed."

"Oh great, so you're gonna make Christmas weird," Gideon complained. "I'm gonna have to get you something bone-proof. Can't ever make it easy for me, can you, Nonagesimus?"

This at least was familiar territory. “Nothing is easy,” Harrow said briskly. “Life is an endless series of merciless trials. Clean your face, it looks like you tripped and fell into a mud pit and then ate chalk.”

Gideon wiped most of the smeared homage to Drearburh off her face and onto Harrow’s old shawl of office, then dropped the shawl and lunged into a surprise attack, sweeping Harrow up and planting a constellation of sloppy greasepaint kisses over her cheeks and forehead. Harrow squawked and got in one good elbow jab to the solar plexus, but too late. By the time Gideon put her down her whole face was hot and smeared unevenly with sticky-smooth oily blotches. She shuddered to think what she must look like.

But there was no one else around. Not even many students were out sunbathing this close to the start of winter, and the ones who were kept to the quad near the coffeeshop on Koniortos. Harrow and Gideon were alone, two figures huddling close together against the sharp edge of the breeze. 

Harrow sighed and dug a bone chip out the pocket of her jacket, pinching it in two fingers and elongating it out into a respectable six inches of serrated bone knife. This she planted in the hard earth like a flagpole — or a grave marker. “There,” she said, brushing the dirt off her hands. “Now are we done with this?”

Gideon snapped a somber photo and took Harrow’s hand. “I think Stabbyhark would like to know that she brought us closer together.”

“She did no such thing.”

“It will be her legacy, remembered forevermore.”

“I’ve already forgotten about her.”

“Her successor will be bone-proof,” Gideon declared, and at least she seemed happy. Harrow didn’t argue.


End file.
